


now you want to be set free

by wildcard_47



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Alternate Universe, Black Widow AU, Gen, The Avengers - Freeform, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:46:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3870883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildcard_47/pseuds/wildcard_47
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A "Joan as Black Widow" AU in five parts. Tiny <i>Age of Ultron</i> spoiler in there if you squint; nothing crucial to the plot. Title taken from the Rita Ora song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now you want to be set free

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adreadfulidea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/gifts).



1.

Their mentors are not supposed to have favorites - this process is about evolution; taking a girl who shows promise and crafting her into a diamond, hard and exceptional - but of course, they all do, and Joan is Gail’s. Being favored does not mean Gail goes easy on Joan. In fact, it’s roughly the opposite. Gail pushes her harder than she pushes any of the other girls; taunts her when she misses an easy kill or punishes her when her makeup becomes smudged under rivers of sweat. Close to graduation, Joan’s in the last day of her final elements training, weak and shivering in the cold forest as she continues toward her target, her skin painted grotesquely for winter camouflage. She’s saving the meager nuts and roots she’s got left; her last good meal was days ago. A figure comes out of the snow for a fight; Joan suddenly finds every one of her blows doesn’t land the way she wants them to, ends up on the ground with a woman’s hand clamped around her mouth and a familiar low voice in her ear. _“You’ll win.”_ Cupped in this hand, pressed against Joan’s blue-tinged lips, is a small cube of cheese.

After graduation, Joan takes the last name Holloway as a mark of honor, discarding the old one because it feels like a lie; someone from another lifetime. She has no idea what happens to Gail, but she she wonders.

2.

She’s not in love with Greyfox. Everyone assumes; they’ve been partners off and on for over fifteen years, both charming and confident and beautiful and openly sexual, so _of course_ they must be soulmates. Of course they must be pining for each other.

They’re not. They were lovers once, when they first met, and then they weren’t, and then they were, and suddenly it was as if they both decided they wanted something more from each other than a quick fuck between contracts. Now, they’re old friends, which can be just as intimate and even more terrifying, depending on the day. In Bulgaria, after the job was over, he asked Joan’s opinion on getting _remarried_. And he was serious.

3.

She’s a drifter who’s lived everywhere in the world, in luxurious studios and rat-filled tenements and slums filled with a planet’s worth of broken, discarded objects, but in her heart of hearts, Joan has a home, and it’s in New York. Although she doesn’t stay there often, she’s kept the same modest apartment in the city for almost as long as she’s been working; when she got it, she paid two years’ worth of rent as a deposit. The owner was so tickled he told her she could do anything she wanted. She painted, brought in furniture, and paid for new plumbing. Her one weakness is hot showers.

4.

They’re sterilized at graduation, so this is nothing more than theoretical, but in those moments in the middle of the night when Joan wakes from a nightmare and sees nothing but rot and death pulsing behind her eyelids, she tries to calm herself by thinking of what might have been. The ordinary life she might have lived if she didn’t have this one, how happy and overworked and miserable and tired it would have made her. A faceless husband to comfort her when she cried. Making a life for herself in her tiny New York apartment; some corporate job in a big industry like retail or finance or advertising, where all the men would underestimate her, while she worked quickly and quietly to destroy them. Sometimes the idea unsettles her. Sometimes she yearns for something so stupidly mundane. In this (awful, ridiculous) fantasy, she can always see the kids’ faces clearly: it’s either a little tow-headed boy, full of energy with chubby cheeks and an easy smile, or a quiet strawberry blonde girl with pale skin and sharp blue eyes: observant. Never both.

5.

She doesn’t make attachments. It’s dangerous to pretend she can be so carefree with her personal life when there are eyes everywhere. A knife waiting around the corner for _that-guy-from-the-bar_ or _the-woman-from-yoga_ if they’re seen together by the wrong people. But she gets hers when she needs to, and more often than not it happens as part of her cover job. Two years ago, she was placed into a university in pursuit of a renowned mathematician; posing as an adjunct with a full course load. The con was long, but the mathematics were easy, university politics were good bloodsport, and the students were terrified of her.

She arrived at the office early one morning, a few hours after stealing the majority of her target’s personal files, and saw an awkward-looking man standing beside her desk, putting a paper-wrapped bouquet of flowers onto it. He was another professor in the department, not powerful or bold enough to warrant her employer’s attention, or anyone else’s, really.

“What the hell are you doing?” she’d asked loudly, shoving her briefcase and coat into the leather chair beside her office door, and crossing her arms over her chest. He’d startled at her sudden appearance, and blushed all the way to his ears. “Oh, god. Your–-well, I saw the email saying it was, you know, February birthdays, and I thought you might like something–-nice. They never do anything for the adjuncts, not even cake.”

He was odd and self-conscious and painfully earnest in a way that was both unnerving and fascinating. Joan looked him up that night on a burner laptop she got from Greyfox–bank accounts, marital history, school records, old police reports with his parents’ names stamped in quick succession–and found he was more or less exactly who he claimed to be, which was so refreshing it actually piqued her interest. They became cordial.

In the end, he kissed her in his office, they slept together four times, and had dinner once, in the school cafeteria on a weeknight after grading papers. The day before she left town, when she’d shut his office door behind her and told him she’d be transferring - saying her contract hadn’t been renewed - he’d taken her hand, and cursed university policy, and was indignant on her behalf. He looked heartbroken. She still thinks about him sometimes. But she keeps his name to herself.


End file.
